India risingIn an India characterised by deep social cleavages and the forward march of globalisation, social struggles have taken many forms, writes Ashok Kumar

India: Slums, students and resistanceWith 1.2 billion people, India is fast becoming one of the world’s major capitalist economies. Vijay Prashad offers some snapshots from a country where shining skyscrapers are springing up alongside ingrained mass poverty

India’s ‘rural reds’India’s communists were among the first in the world to be democratically elected to power. Kheya Bag looks at the history of the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the ongoing struggle for land reform

Turkey: A people imprisonedOnce seen as a moderate party, the AKP government in Turkey is using anti-terrorism legislation to unleash a wave of repression against the left and the Kurdish movement. Tim Baster and Isabelle Merminod spoke to activists in the country

The cost of Kazakh oilA major strike wave in the oil fields of Kazakhstan has turned into murderous repression by the Nazarbayev government. Gabriel Levy reports

Cycle city KathmanduJennie O’Hara meets Nepali campaigners seeking to tackle pollution and inequality by transforming their capital into a cycle-friendly city

Behind the seamsLaia Blanch spoke to Amirul Haque Amin, president of the National Garment Workers Federation in Bangladesh

Make or break for Japan’s leftJapan's Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama has resigned after his failure to honour an election promise to move a US military base from Okinawa, Glyn Ford reports

Beating Burma’s blackoutThe film Burma VJ brings Burma's struggle for freedom into close proximity to its audience and is generating new solidarity efforts as a result. Siobhan McGuirk investigates

Chemical criminalsOn 3 December 1984, the world's worst industrial disaster took place at Bhopal in India. Twenty-five years on, Rajwinder Sahota visits the city
to find out what happened to the victims

Unnatural no moreIn July, the Delhi high court in India decriminalised homosexuality. Sylvia Rowley talks to Shaleen Rakesh, the activist who brought the case

23 JuneVietnamese photographer Nick Ut's Pullitzer prize-winning photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing a US napalm attack on her village appeared in Life magazine on this day in 1972. The picture had previously been rejected by some news agencies because it showed a naked girl.

Viva SivaNow in his eighties, A Sivanandan remains an important figure
in the politics of race and class, maintaining his long-held
insistence that only in the symbiosis of the two struggles can a
genuinely radical politics be found. By Arun Kundnani

Background to brutalityThe resumption of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war following the government's unilateral abrogation of the ceasefire with the Tamil Tigers last year has seen killing and other abuses on a massive scale. Deirdre McConnell examines the background to the continuing conflict between the country's Sinhalese majority and its Tamil and other minorities

The challenges of solidarityThe urgent need in Sri Lanka is a resolution to the humanitarian crisis and strong pressure to stop government attacks on minorities, argues Ahilan Kadirgamar. But solidarity has to be pluralist, he emphasises, recognising the brutality of the Tamil Tigers and avoiding the polarisation or marginalisation of the country's diverse communities

Can’t you see the writing on the wallWith hundreds of civilians killed and a quarter of a million people trapped by the current fighting, Lonán Álvaro considers the humanitarian cost of Sri Lanka's 25-year long conflict